Backup Solutions – The most important thing we overlook

By: Eric Lewis

Whether you are a company who runs primarily on paper, or you have joined the masses who have moved to paperless, keeping your data current / safe and accessible is a constant concern. You may have information stored electronically, on your desktop or in a network. Most business know what information they have and where to find it. Ironically, most companies do not have a plan to recover information or data in the event the data is lost or corrupt. All too often companies are working without the ‘safety net’ of scheduled, clear and current backups.

Having the appropriate backups can save you money, resources, and human capital needed to “find” the lost data. A backup can make the difference between loosing months or maybe even years’ worth of work versus being able to pick up where you left off the day before in the case of a major failure.

Think of backups as a proactive ‘insurance policy’ to cover your business in the event of a threat. There are many methods to back up your information; however, we will focus on two (2) methods. The most common is a local backup at your facility. Backups can be set to run as often as hourly to safeguard against a system failure. The question you should ask in tandem with backups is, Disaster Recovery. What if a natural disaster hit your facility and your physical machines were damaged or destroyed? In order to ensure your data is recoverable in the event of a disaster you should consider offsite backups. These backups generally run less frequently but give you the ability to store your data at another location enabling you the safety net of recovering data should your primary facility be ‘offline’ aka Disaster Recovery.

Deploying backups both onsite and offsite may add additional costs to your IT budget but they also provide an invaluable safety to your businesses data. If as you’re reading this, you think you can’t afford the increase in the IT budget to allow for sufficient backups let me ask you one question. How effective would your business be tomorrow without the data, history, and information you have at your fingertips today?

If you need help, or want to talk about getting your backup system in line with your business needs, or you honestly don’t know where to start give us a call. We would love to talk with you about protecting your business and your data. For more information contact Cross IT at info@crossit.com.